How to create adorable stop motion videos for free

I recently created a stop-motion Christmas card for friends and family, and thought it was too adorable not to share on social too. Take a look:

After uploading it, a few people asked me how I had created it, and I struggled to come up with a short answer. This was the best I managed:

But that still didn’t feel good enough – so I spent the night creating a new stop motion vid, with a few photos on the way to demonstrate the process.

Step 1. Storyboard

I didn’t bother with a storyboard for my Xmas video as it was quite straight forward, but the new video I had in mind was a little more busy so I thought it’d be helpful.

The premise was a ‘sort out your social media profiles so that they reflect what you want to be known for’.

So here is page 1 of 2 of my storyboard:

So as you can see, it’s pretty rough around the edges, but gave me essentially a to-do list!

Step 2: Create your pieces!

Arguably, this is the fun stage! For this, I went through my storyboard and started creating its various elements. I used felt tip pens (of which I only have a few colours, you might have noticed!), a sharpie, a blunt pencil, and scissors. I created them all on a Faber-Castell Mixed Media Pad because there’s less risk of tearing and breaking when cutting things up and dampening them with felt tips.

Here’s what this process looked like in progress:

Step 3: Set up!

Next I aligned all the different pieces of paper in order of their appearance, for ease of grabbing.

I then set up my tripod – mine is a Gorillapod (like this one), and it struggles with the weight of phone at this angle, so there’s lots of fussing around involved. As the tips of the pod are magnetic, I used scissors on one end to balance the weight out.

As you can see, I used the same mixed pad as the backdrop for this film!

Step 4: Film!

Stopmotion is essentially a series of photos. The more pictures you take with incremental changes, the better in general!

For this I used a free phone app called Stop Motion Studio. You can either set a timer for the photos to be taken or do it manually (my preference).

With this video, I didn’t want too much animation really as it was essentially a moving comic, with quite a lot of information to take in, so a bit different to my Christmas video!

Step 5: Edit

Within the Stop Motion Studio you can watch your creation back and duplicate images if it’s gone too fast. You can also slow down or speed up your creation depending on what’s needed.

Screenshot of Stop Motion Studio App

Once happy with this, I uploaded the video to Google Drive (the email function rarely seems to work with this app), and uploaded it to Filmora, but you could just as easily upload it to any other video editing software.

If all you want to do is add music, you can also just directly upload it to YouTube and pick something from their audio library that suits:

In fact, YouTube’s audio library is where I picked the music for my video. You can browse through it by mood, instruments, length and more. I typed in ‘hero’ and picked this tune, which happens to be free to use in any video without attribution (thanks Silent Partner!):